The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many current Long Term Evolution (LTE) modem implementations use a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) IX to connect and transfer data from a modem platform to a host platform. In these implementations, received data is stored in modem off-chip memory as it arrives over the air (OTA) interface during an aggregation period. When the aggregation period expires, the PCIe link is activated and the data is delivered to the host platform. This way of temporarily storing data in the modem off-chip memory may help to save power and reduce energy consumption for data rates currently provided by Fourth Generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) (e.g., approximately 300-400 megabits per second (Mbits) depending on the user equipment category, bandwidth size, modulation and coding scheme (MCS), Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) scheme, etc.), since the power needed to write data and read it back to/from modem off-chip memory is lower than the power needed for keeping the PCIe link in the active state.